


Face to Face

by VoyagerSoa



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Physical Trauma, Slow Burn, past relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-02-16 15:54:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18694627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VoyagerSoa/pseuds/VoyagerSoa
Summary: Jayce, Defender of Tomorrow. Viktor, the Machine Herald. Once, a long time ago, they were partners. Now they are enemies. An event that has rendered Jayce without his hammer or the use of his legs sets them on a path ruminating in past love, current trouble, and regrets.





	1. We Were

Progress Day.

Viktor had been multitasking; monitoring the gala for so much of a scrap of something interesting and his drink, he felt no appetite for the latter and precious nothing for the former. It was one of those parties—the elite were fraternizing and showing off whatever invention for fashion happened to be stylish that month. Right now it was frilly skirts and hats that were three times as long as his head. He would wonder why events like these were mandatory for university students (special for university students that had other, more important things to be doing) but preferred stroking boredom over asking any of his teachers why over concern of maybe looking a touch too ungrateful.

Right then, as it was becoming monotonous even for Viktor…

“You don’t want to be here either, do you?”

Viktor was alone on the wall for it to have been addressed to anyone else. Turning his head toward the voice, another student was talking to him. Broad, brown hair, slightly embarrassing cowlick. They were sharing the same emblem for their year on a matching pair of white-down vests. If they were classmates, Viktor didn’t recognize him. He smiled, if only to be polite.

“No,” he agreed, earnest. “Do you have any idea why these would be compulsory?”

The other student shrugged. “Last I heard they don’t want students wandering off while everyone else is busy dancing and drinking. Make any sense to you?”

“Not in the least.”

“Heh.” Then a bright-gloved hand was being presented to Viktor. “Jayce.”

He took it openly. “Viktor.”

“Same year,” Jayce observed, taking his hand back, using it to point for Viktor’s emblem. “What do you do?”

“Engineering. Some medical classes. I diversify,” he answered. “Yourself?”

Jayce smirked. “Emphasis on the engineering.”

“Fair enough. I’m shocked I haven’t seen you around before.”

“Oh, you know,” Jayce said, treating it as an invitation. “I prefer being in front of a lathe than watching these guys trip over themselves. So if you haven’t been around my workshop, well. Consider this handsome face limited edition.”

“Really?” Viktor ignored the comment. “What projects are you working on?” It was among the first time any other student interested Viktor quite like this. And, although we couldn’t suggest as to what Jayce was feeling right then, he probably felt the same if not just for having another student to peddle his ego to.

“Right now?” Jayce’s periwinkle-blue eyes were shining with delight. “An actuator. Makes it simpler to integrate hextech with ordinary stuff. Making machines smarter, more robust…” He looked at him. “You’re a Zaunite, right?”

 _Um._ Viktor tugged unconsciously on his scarf, aware painfully and suddenly for how different he must’ve appeared. He was pale, tree-like and gangly; the scarf he wore was but one of many to cover up the speckles of Gray on his skin that were there the day he was born. The greatest condemnation were his irises, a sickly, neon shade of amber that he hated vehemently but could do nothing to correct. Jayce, on the other had, was an obvious native son of Piltover and was that much prouder for it.

“Yes,” Viktor said eventually, and it was as much as he wanted to say on the matter.

Jayce just smiled. “Interesting. I don’t really see any Zaunites up here. Well, probably that it’s so expensive and prodigious…”

“I have a scholarship,” replied Viktor, tone defensive. “I wouldn’t have been able to afford it otherwise.” _Or had been given a seat to start with,_ he wanted to say, but wouldn’t. He had long since swallowed that particular horse pill. Trying to put it out of his mind, he shone the spotlight back on Jayce. “The party’s almost over. Would you mind if I stopped by your workshop after? Just to see what it is you’re doing?”

“Nope.” Jayce sipped from his champagne glass. “Go ahead. I’m actually further along than I’d thought I’d be for a few week’s worth of work. The professors are gonna be scrambling to draft up all new kinds of awards to give out once I’m done, I’m sure,” he said, and in this he was being entirely, brutally sincere. Viktor didn’t mind. As far as he was concerned, an ego you could crack someone’s skull with were you to hit them over the head with it didn’t phase him in the least so long as Jayce had anything to show for the talk he was talking. After all, he was a Zaunite, and this was Piltover. It was more or less the status quo. So without dropping a beat, he said:

“Well, that’s something to look forward to.”

“Ha! And see them cringing and wistfully handing over the awards to me? After all the breath they’ve wasted promising up and down I won’t become something if I can’t work with anybody? Oh, _**rue**_ the day.”

But that was all so long ago.

Here sat Zaun. See her Sump, and know how she endured.

It was a modest day for the Machine Herald, whose actuators informed him by way of lines of text across the screen of his mask’s visor that it was unusually warm this morning. Nothing he had to be concerned with, and he continued unabated with shimmying through pinhole alleyways and under massive copper-toned chemtech pipes, the Sump hiss becoming a dull roar. This hiss—annoyance at best for those born above, but down here, surrounded by machines whirring away and engines tinkering ever forward, this hiss was Zaun’s most favorite song. Viktor took it in. Found its comfort. And knocked on the door.

“Oh, by the Builder,” went the voice behind it, groggy and surprised. “Who is it?”

“Myself,” Viktor said to the door. “Do you remember, Kieran?”

“ _Viktor?_ ” The door cracked open but only enough such that their eyes met. “My. It is you. Good grief… you’ve found me already. Are you going to report me to the nearest Chem-Baron if I don’t let you in?”

“Why would I do that?”

“…” Kieran turned, walking away. With the entryway unattended, Viktor helped himself to letting himself inside.

“I can’t believe it,” Kieran lamented, glancing over at Viktor from his shoulder. He sounded exasperated, like he’d been running for a long time or—and this Viktor thought more likely—crying. “What they’ve done to me.”

“It is shameful.” Viktor watched him carefully. Kieran was not a shapely man, but not willowy either, instead average in every way. His red hair was a mess compared to the slick comb-over Viktor remembered it being back above, and he was still wearing Piltovan style that must’ve announced his heritage to everyone in a mile radius here. It came as no surprise he was hiding out on the fringe close beside the Sump. “But you knew it was going to happen eventually, did you not? After it happened to me?”

Kieran made a face. “You were more of an engineer than myself, Viktor,” he said, spitting it out. “I am—I was—a doctor first and foremost. How could I not think that would keep me safe? Not even the richest that live atop the Sun Gate can refuse a doctor when they need one. Now here I am, clawing at the refuse like the rest of you.”

“I am still a doctor as much as I am an inventor,” Viktor replied, unbothered by Kieran’s implication. “It would have been impossible to specialize into my augments were I not one. But I came to visit as I am concerned about you, Kieran, from one former colleague to another. Being so close to the Sump is awfully unkind to the newly exiled. I would have you—”

“Conscripted into your little cult, right?” Kieran was glaring with more than just his words. “Because I’m vulnerable now, my titles gone and myself penniless? Give me a break, Viktor. I’ve still got my pride. And the knowledge that whatever it is you think you’re doing is unethical as sin. You prey on the ignorant and desperate.”

_You prey on the ignorant and desperate._

Viktor, choosing not to respond right then, instead used the moment to give Kieran’s hold a once around. It was motley, to put it mildly. Drab pigs-iron was all there was for the support arches, fitted with cheap insulation that must have kept him warm worth hardly anything when bedding down at night. The kitchen was going nowhere fast even by Zaun standards. Viktor presumed Kieran must’ve bought this shack, single room and all, from a squatter on the cheapest coin possible, hence the comment about Chem-barons. The only signs the occupant was a Piltovan exile and not another Zaunite down on his luck were various documents strewn around whose parchment by themselves exceeded the value of the house put together and a gold-and-red knitted rug left out in the center. Out of everything Kieran chose to run away with, his was a rug.

“Have you been attacked?” asked Viktor, at last letting his cane stand at ease on the floor.

“By who? The locals? They gossip, sure. And aren’t too happy to see me when I ask around. But I’m—I will—I have to open a clinic, Viktor. I can’t just live like this, you know. It’s horrible…”

“You’re very cut up about this Kieran.”

Kieran, then choking back tears, wore his face red like fire. “You think?! You _**think**_ , Viktor?! Of course I’m cut up about this! This,”—and he pointed frantically at the house—“is my **life** now! All because, what? I published those papers saying that you— _your people_ —are being damaged physically by the Sump! That’s what I got! These damn court papers and…” He slumped into a nearby stool, head in his hands. “I was trying to do the right thing. They want to live in a wonderland where Zaunites are inferior physically and they need take no responsibility for what the Sump has done and will do over generations.”

“They’d rather the Sump not exist, yes,” Viktor agreed, regarding Kieran. His digitizer did not waver so much an inch in purview of the latter’s hysterics, and it never would. “News that the Sump is the cause for genetic drift, backed with holistic research, had to have been quite the scandal to have out in the open. For the record, Kieran, I have read your studies. They are good. But what is good and what is not doesn’t matter in Piltover. Did you not know better?”

“I thought that maybe… people would realize… and it wouldn’t matter what the families wanted done to me. They took everything, Viktor. My job. My patients. My house. All gone. Some Giopara must be throwing a party on top of my grave and there’s nothing I can do to get what I had back.”

“It’s unfortunate, but there are things that can be done about it. There is a life to have in Zaun. One that, as you say, need not be this.”

“Yeah, under the boots of the nearest baron. Hail law and order in Zaun.”

“Or you could help me.” Viktor suggested him with his cane. “I would like you on board, Kieran. You were a gifted surgeon last we were working together. It would be nothing for me to lend my aid to you, but you must want to help yourself.”

Kieran stared. “Your Glorious Evolution is a sham. Just so happens to be the nicest sounding sham down here. Everyone knows that in Piltover. You were among the best and brightest, then you go away for years and walk out totally removed of moral or sense. Why would I want to help that?”

“I won’t force you,” said Viktor. “It is your choice. It has always been a choice. You may either come with me or you may stay here. I can guarantee your safety for only one of those choices, but it is yours to make.”

Kieran sat in silence. Viktor allowed him. He was sure Kieran considered that, for everything, Viktor was offering him a way out while at the end of his rope. He didn’t come blazing in or uproaring about politics. The Machine Herald, for all those rumors and sayings and superstitions, simply was. He could either take it or leave it and stay in this hobble-shack beside the hiss and Sump-gas.

It didn’t take long. “Fine, Viktor. I’ll go. I can’t stand being here anymore as is. Would you let me open a clinic?”

“It would be to my pleasure.”

“Then let’s go.” Kieran stood, pushing final tears out of his eyes. “I… I should say thanks, I guess. For thinking of me. I never that you… still cared at all about those who knew you before,”—he was looking at the mask—“all of that.”

“Are you going to take anything with you?”

“What, my rug?” Kieran smiled crookedly. “Like that’s going to make a difference. I just want out.” The only thing he grabbed before they began to leave was a respirator whose tank Viktor recognized as being close to empty.

They were gone. The Sump kept on singing.

The walk to Viktor’s laboratory was brisk. While he originally had the house on Emberflit, it’d been outgrown quickly as more and more acolytes loyal to the Evolution started to pour it from all corners and creeds of Zaun and Viktor denied no-one. Among them was an acolyte who happened to be a landowner in a quieter area of Zaun, since having turned over several empty warehouses to be remodeled from the ground up into a massive, sprawling compound. At first Viktor feared that such a large site would have attracted undue attention—and it was—but he also soon realized that Zaun at its best hoped for him and at worst tolerated him no matter which face people wore in public.

Kieran, who saw this now, gasped. “By the Builder.” He was nearly speechless. “It’s gigantic… how, how many people do you _have,_ Viktor?”

“More than this,” said Viktor, nodding to an acolyte that manned the gate. “Many still live in their homes than live here on site. And more come everyday. The Evolution ever turns, Kieran.” The gate rattled and buzzed with a familiar whine of clockwork, but open as promptly as it may. Acolytes walked, talking and laughing in the intervening paths, the tiniest sliver of sky from Piltover above the only source of natural light; for the rest, a neon fog of chemical green.

“There’s plenty of space for you to open a clinic here,” Viktor informed him. “The sick and wounded of Zaun come often. They’d be delighted to have someone of your skill and expertise. Is this reasonable for you?”

“And you don’t…”

“…hook them up with augments? Not unless necessary or asked for, no. You must understand, Kieran, despite the Evolution’s appeal, getting the materials necessary and needed for augmentations and research is a struggle on its own. There’s no ability, let alone a want, to foist them on those coming here only to heal.”

“Wow.” Kieran rubbed his hands together. “That’s, uh. Very sensible. You know, they don’t paint your people as so sensible back home.”

This, now, Viktor chuckled. It came off like a noisy, halfway analog rumble. “No, that they do not. But that has never bothered me, neither my acolytes. The people of Piltover are being lied to on a daily basis. They believe their city’s key tenant is progress, when what the families want is progress but society to stay the same.”

He raised his cane to the physical manifestation of his Glorious Evolution.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same. This Evolution will be different than that, and none shall ignore us.”

“Herald,” a new voice cut in. Hers was Zoja, among Viktor’s most trusted allies of the Evolution—she’d long since grown past a title as diminutive as acolyte. Her alloyed tail lied around her legs, flicking softly. She was frowning. “I have news.”

“Kieran, if you’ll allow me.” Kieran nodded and, not knowing anywhere else to be going, backed off just behind the gates. Viktor turned to Zoja.

“We found Jayce in Zaun,” she said, pushing a lock of dark hair from her face. “He’d been left for dead.”

And the Sump’s song cracked into symphony.

Jayce was more than battered by when Viktor could see him—he was barely hanging on, and Viktor knew he was the only one who was able to save him. He demanded a room be cleared for immediate operation, enlisting Kieran for assistant surgeon and, with no emotion flicking on in those cool amber eyes, prepares for a battle he was too aware wouldn’t be easily won.

(“The hammer?” Viktor asked. “Where’s the _hammer?_ The crystal?”

Zoja shook her head. “Missing. His body was dumped not that far from the Sump. Whoever had a go at him either thought he was dead alright or didn’t care either way.”)

It was a long, long surgery. There were several moments where Jayce’s vitals had flatlined and the entire operating room dragged into a heavy silence before, at last, a pulse was discovered and colors return to the earth. Several more still where the hope of rescuing him wanes and wanes. But Jayce fought. Viktor fought. And his hands never became unsteady.

(“I don’t know who could’ve done it,” Zoja said. “He beat you. Then we find him in our city barely alive. Do you think they were trying to send a message?”

“It doesn’t matter now. I have to see him.” She would never see him be this instistent and yet so withdrawn again.)

Kieran hadn’t ever done a surgery quite like this. Machines were dangling from every corner of the operating room, whirring away. As naturally as he would another pair of limbs, Viktor willed them all. Every now and again he was asked for an implement or to turn a knob, but he felt less the Herald’s assistant and more a watcher so someone might later tell the story of how he pulled out a miracle. Jayce looked dead the moment his body was wheeled in and now there were, however faint, the subtle stirring of life.

Kieran began to believe.

(“His legs.”

“Shattered from the waist down. It’s as though someone took a sledgehammer to them. They broke him.”)

Hours became minutes, minutes became seconds; it was a blur from task to task. All the while, someone whose life Viktor once commanded his followers to snuff dry hung in the balance. This wasn’t from him. Someone else had come and stolen the key, the crystal, and cast Jayce off were he the chaff. Now, the Herald was doing everything in his power to save it.

(“You’re not going to let him go, are you? Herald.. It’s bleak.”

Viktor said nothing.)

And then… and then…

Kieran was first. “Vital signs stable. No major damage to the brain. Concentration of trauma in the legs. It may take months for the bones to heal. And the nerves… the nerves might never. I’ve never seen damage quite like this. It’s like a scatterplot. Whoever did this were as precise as they were blunt. How do you think he survived?”

“Presence of mind,” Viktor said, the first he had spoken that wasn’t a command since Jayce was brought in. “Force of will. They stole his hammer, but couldn’t steal the want to live. Had we been any later, I doubt we would have been able to salvage what we did without amputation.”

“Even as we had him, amputation seemed like the most reasonable—”

“No.” Viktor called him away, and he does. He was left alone with Jayce, sitting and waiting.

“Son of Piltover,” he said, after what felt like a millennia. “Wake up.”

Jayce opened his eyes. It was a while before his gaze latched onto anything in particular, first the room and then Viktor. They narrowed. He strained to say something.

“Don’t waste your energy.” The cane glowed lowly. “I do not expect you to speak. But I do expect you to listen. Your hammer is missing, Jayce. Someone not among me or my acolytes attacked you. The crystal is unsurprisingly gone as well. I’ve restored you to the best of my ability with the help of Doctor Kieran. You are in my compound, which I will permit you to stay for as long as necessary in the healing process. Another must have realized the potential of your crystal and conspired to put you where you are now. To what end, I do not yet know. I have avoided the need for implanting any augments to save you. And I know you will argue…”

He stood.

“But you know as much as I that it’s true.”

Jayce lied there, then found what most resembled a voice, dry, hearse and weak. “Viktor…”

He was staring.

“Why… didn’t you… kill me?”

“Why?” The cane twirled around, Viktor himself looking into a port window that viewed the greater streets of Zaun. “Why didn’t I. I suppose it’s a valid question, considering the nature of our relationship. Yet I feel as though you already know, Jayce. Speaking in pragmatic terms, I need your help and you need mine for recovering the hammer from those that have stolen it. The crystal must not be misused in the hands of those that don’t understand it. I could have made each and every rumor and nightmare you have of me come true. I could have. I have not. Whichever you decide to think of me for it, it does not matter. There’s work to be done.”

But as Viktor was talking, he was thinking in both present and past. He thought about the Jayce before him, maligned and barely speaking, and the Jayce that was. Tall, incredible Jayce. The brilliant inventor. The abhorrent lack of interpersonal skills toeing behind that wake of pure genius. The Jayce he had befriended, work with, split from and hated. But Viktor cannot feel hate now. He cannot feel disgust.

He, once, a long time ago, felt love.

“I leave you to think on this as you recover, Jayce.” Then he turned for the door. After a pause, holding the doorway:

“Be well.”


	2. Secrets

Jayce and Viktor shared their first kiss at the pier beneath a forever-glowering Sun Gate.

The kiss was neither precise nor intended; it was clumsy and by circumstance, as most first kisses are. Jayce wound up the one that had initiated it, although if you were to ask him he wouldn’t remember what for—as if he was ever the type to need a reason—and was guilty initially for having done it without so much a warning before he heard, after a requisite pause for effect, Viktor starting to laugh. Then they were both doing it, both laughing, laughing because it was silly or some other, so silly it’d happened at all, and they kept laughing while the sun continued to ebb over the docks.

After, Jayce didn’t believe he loved Viktor.

Not that Viktor was a Zaunite. Or his working partner. Or anything of that ilk; he just didn’t believe it. For him they were friends. Good friends. Great friends even, of the kind that would be found occasionally by dorm monitors together in each other’s beds (and they were not about to ask for a shared living situation from one of the housing principals, that was for damn sure), as great friends do. That kiss was just another thing that had happened without being much to think on. He was preoccupied already with his—their—newest project by the following afternoon.

So why was Viktor staring at him like that?

“Hey, Vik,” Jayce said, addressing him from the precipice of their shared prototype. “You’re staring.”

“Am I?” Viktor snapped to his notes, and saying he did so hastily would’ve been undercutting it. “Sorry.”

 _Huh._ Strange. Viktor wasn’t the kind of guy to do that—just stare in silence—let alone make it look like that Jayce had just yanked him out of a daze. In fact, Jayce knew from experience that Viktor didn’t like staring to the point of having trouble with eye contact. Not that it bothered him any, but he could remember at least a few times where Viktor wound up catching ire from professors concerned about his ability to deliver their findings in what they described as a “professional manner”, whatever that meant. Jayce would usually get docked for being cocky, so that made the two of them. Tinkering again with the hextech add-on they were working on, he made it a few more minutes until it occurred to him that maybe he should mention it.

“So, yesterday,” Jayce prompted, glancing up.

“I enjoyed it,” Viktor said, watching him watch him. There was a nervous air about it. “Did you?”

“Better than any kind of girl I’ve kissed before,” Jayce mugged, confident as usual. “I didn’t expect that. So that was cool.”

Viktor’s face turned a bright shade of beet-red (he was so pale it was almost comical to see), and didn’t say anything. Jayce, taking it as permission that the conversation had reached its brief and logical ending, returned to fixing out blueprints and equations in his head. It had to have been a good half hour of that duly, quiet work before he heard Viktor’s voice again.

“We should figure this out.”

“What, the hextech? Already way ahead of you, buddy.”

“Our relationship.”

A beat. “Oh.” Another. “I see.” What Jayce really wanted to say but couldn’t for both parts was, _What’s there to figure out?_

 _Sure,_ thought Jayce, _I slept around a lot before I met him and now I don’t._ But that in itself couldn’t have meant anything. He was growing up. They had to be, what, about twenty-three (he hadn’t asked Viktor what his birthday was, nor remembered it if he had) between the both of them, right? Sleeping around with whomever was so much as mildly attractive and had a place warm and concave was for first-years and morons. Jayce wasn’t a moron, so he cleaned up his act. Even if he kind of missed that reputation of being a serial heartbreaker to woo the adoration of all the pretty girls at those mandatory Progress Day galas which, for the record, he considered the only thing those galas were ever going to be much good for. Viktor also wasn’t a moron, so he had to know this as much as he did. Was he just being sentimental? Pulling his leg?

“I like you, Jayce.”

But then Jayce, entirely, completely reflexively, replied with, “I like me, too.”

Viktor drained of all color. He sank back to the blueprints he’d been working on and did not rise until it was time for them to leave for the day. Jayce, apparently unaffected by his weird behavior, threw his coat on and stood there in the doorway, waiting for Viktor to catch up.

“So, we hitting up Stella’s tonight? I’m starving.”

“Um.” Viktor appeared to contemplate this very deeply, miffing Jayce. What, did he have some surprise plans he wanted to do later that somehow wouldn’t involve him? No way he’d have to think about grabbing a bite to eat that hard. He had to be hungry too!

“Sure,” said Viktor, finally, and Jayce nodded and went along with him. Good on Viktor for getting past that seemingly perilous decision. Jayce would not have looked forward to sitting alone like he was some kind of nonce at Stella’s otherwise. Typically he’d never care, but Stella’s was, well, Stella’s. They were both regulars. And the thought of having to answer why Viktor wasn’t there with him was an all-around unpleasant one, more so for when you were Jayce and wore your despondence for others save for a precious few though it were a badge of pride.

They got to Stella’s. Viktor was staring again.

“Vik,” Jayce started as he bit into some sirloin, “You gotta tell me what’s going on. Something’s definitely going on. Are you on, like, the edge of a breakthrough and don’t know how to tell me? Because we could definitely be using a breakthrough right around now. My—our—portfolio would be the best in the university if we got another one, and the Giopara will be making the rounds in a couple of weeks, and—”

“Jayce.” Something about the way Viktor said his own name made Jayce shut up instantly. Like a hammer slamming down on a gavel.

“Jayce…” repeated Viktor, and now he sighed, long and deep. “I’m in love with you.”

_I’m in love with you._

Jayce, for his part, tried his best not to choke. After that was done and the sirloin he’d been eating was no longer a latent thread on his life, he realized that nothing came to mind as to what to say in response. Nothing, and truly nothing, fit his lips. What _was_ there to say to that? Laugh? Say that you’re sorry? Apologize?

“Well, uh.” Jayce almost wished he was choking again. Least then that was a good excuse. He palmed his hands together, nodding his head meaninglessly, and came up with only, “That’s a shock. That’s… really, really, shocking for you to say, Viktor.”

Would it be ironic, then, in knowing that the very same docks would have become the point with which their relationship shattered forever?

Jayce, by and large, spent the first days post-surgery sleeping. There was nothing else for him to do. Dimly he noticed the intravenous drip leading into his arm and spent the better part of an hour contemplating hazily for whether or not he should rip it out. Then the pain in his legs flared up and he couldn’t find the energy to do it even if he wanted to any longer. So, for want of anything and the ability to do nothing but, he slept. Dreamed of darkness, of an endless, consuming blackness.

When he improved enough to find his voice again, Jayce made five demands:

The first request was for a glass of water.

The second was to send him back to Piltover.

The third was to see his legs.

The fourth was to send him back to Piltover, more hysterical that time.

The fifth was incomprehensible, because he had to be sedated.

He did not sleep well after that.

Sleep would come in bits and bites and sneak-attacks, for it was generally an activity Jayce now actively tried to avoid, as reason wriggled back into his senses and he realized with full lucidity the gravity of having become at the mercy of his enemy in their own hive, hammer gone and missing, himself unable to move from the waist down. It was a living nightmare. So he tried his best to stay alert and aware though it could have meant anything when the best he’d be able to do were he to successfully throw himself from the medical cot being a slow, pathetic crawl.

Whenever an acolyte entered the room to check his vitals or assess his status, Jayce would glare the same helpless glare of an animal trapped in a cage. There was the occasional conversation beyond the door between Viktor and somebody else, probably Doctor Kieran. Doctor Kieran was the only one Jayce made any effort whatsoever to respond to, he who had listened to the original set of demands, and everyone knew why.

“His condition is on an upward trend, Herald. It’s miraculous.”

“I am aware of his improvement. It should be due to a yet unknown effect using the crystal has had on his body. I once believed that any strengthening quality the crystal had done for him was dependent entirely on its continued presence, but that no longer appears to be the case for at least some reduced capacity. I am researching my observations.”

“Still… even if it were true, it will nevertheless be weeks. Months. Typically I would never suggest it, but have you considered trying to contact a magician healer from outside Piltover? Although their prices would be egregious…”

“And risk whatever magic they use interfering with the crystal’s lingering power? No. He will heal naturally. This is as much we can do.”

“As you say, Herald. I leave you to your business.”

And then the doors hissed wide, turning open. Jayce’s hands imperceptibly tightened against the grips of the cot.

“Jayce.”

He opened his eyes.

“Viktor.”

In one arm was that terrible staff and in another a box, shining of metal with a gold trim. Viktor walked inside and sat down just beside Jayce, where he would not be able to reach him should that had been his fancy that morning, putting the box down on his lap and the staff at ease in the grip of his third arm.

“We should speak about what happened to you the day of your beating,” said Viktor, voice unnaturally closed and even, a despotic digital hiss. “The perpetrators took care not to leave any obvious traces where they dumped you, and we have been thus far unable to find where the original altercation had taken place. By now it will be undoubtedly scrubbed even if we had. We are in need of a lead.”

Jayce fumigated in a tense silence. How could Viktor just be like that? So cavalier? So apt to pretend like he was so focused on the task at hand when Jayce himself was, by any measure, but a circus pet for him and his brainwashed acolytes to poke a stick at and laugh about? There were other crystals in the world beside Jayce’s and sure, he was convinced that whomever had done this to his legs and stolen his hammer wouldn’t have good intentions in mind for what to do with it, but Viktor was ultimately Viktor. Jayce had fully expected him to be basking in this victory and yet instead here he was, talking at him though they’d somehow become the best of pals again. Partners. Colleagues. It made him sick to borderline nausea.

So he spat: “You once ordered to have me killed by people you made into monsters, Viktor. Why would I ever talk to you?”

“You have spoken to Doctor Kieran, have you not? And he is with us.”

“Kieran is a Piltovan-in-exile, Viktor. He’s being strung along. He’ll come to his senses eventually and return to the surface.”

“Will he, now? Was it not your favorite clan, the Giopara, that had him thrown from the Sun Gate to begin with? For, as Doctor Kieran himself has described to me, making such a stir with those publications concerning the Sump and the genetic drift that is now happening to generations of Zaunites born under it?” Viktor’s amber eyes, cast in their piercing veneer, were like fire to Jayce’s weak but tenacious blue. “Are you telling me you’d lend him amnesty? Is that something you’re even allowed to do?”

Jayce refused to let him have it. “I can talk to people. It’s true, what the Sump might be doing for your people isn’t good. But what Zaun itself allows people like you to do isn’t good, either. I have to pick my battles, Viktor. I’m just one guy. And now… and now I don’t even have my hammer.”

“Rather introspective of you, Jayce.” Although phrased like a barb, Viktor stated it matter-of-factly, as he did everything. Then he opened the box, which, of all things, Jayce saw oranges in there, presumably smuggled from the jungles of Kumungu. Viktor let down his mask and took a bite. “Do you understand, then, why my Evolution must exist? That it would be impossible to do for, as you put it, _just one guy?_ Whether you willed it to happen or not, the people of Piltover look to you as their most stalwart defender. Their savior. Their noble knight in his noble armor.”

Jayce breathed deeply, throat starting to dry up. The realization that this was the first he’d seen Viktor’s real physical face behind that mask of his since his taking on of the mantle of center madman to a megalomaniacal techno-cult barely registered; the pain in his legs hurt again, like lava. Nevertheless some shard of him remained that noted for, despite the digitizer in place of the natural voice he had grown accustomed to for years, Viktor still ate and had full control of his jaw, alloyed and mechanical it may have been. There were plates that curved from his chin up to about halfway on either side of his cheeks, skin pigmentation somehow even paler than he remembered—bleach white, contrasting sharply the healthy color of the oranges he’d been eating.

When the lava receded enough that Jayce could rise to speak again, his tone was glummer now, more defeated. “I didn’t see them. I should have… there’s sensors in my hammer that detects heat and movement, relays it back to me. It happened so fast. It’s like a blur in my head. I don’t doubt magic had to be involved. Big magic. Nothing like hextech could have done what they did. First I was there, alert, and the next thing I know, I wake up here and there’s fire in my legs.”

Viktor appeared to think on this, and then proposed: “Ionian magic, perhaps. I am privy to reports from my acolytes that have visited the First Lands that several rogue cells of groups and governments have arisen since Noxus’s departure from their failed invasion. And that incident at Ford’s Theater some months ago… even Camille herself found it within her to participate in the cover up for that. We are in interesting times, Jayce.”

Listening to this made Jayce uneasy. “What happened at Ford’s Theater?” He anticipated Viktor might mug him, be smug that he knew what he didn’t, but he answered merely in that typical, dull monotone, offering Jayce the last untouched orange. (He took it, but only just.)

“The newsreels you’ve no doubt read reported that terrible fire at the theater for that advance showing of the orchestra from Demacia. What they failed to mention was that the fire was arson and, moreover, the recovery team sent to clean up were all killed save for Camille by an unknown, reportedly Ionian insurgent that escaped their and her altercation. I became aware of this when a lieutenant of mine happened to steal Ferros-bound papers discussing the unredacted matter while they were in transit. The security hole’s been plugged since, but I doubt Ferros has made much if any headway in identifying the murderer.”

“…” Could Jayce really trust Viktor to just tell him this? Sure, Jayce didn’t like Camille or the grisly manner with which she sought to keep the peace that all Piltovans wanted between themselves and Zaun, but tens if not hundreds of people lost their lives in that fire. It wasn’t right to keep the fact it was no accident from their families, let alone the regular authorities who could’ve been investigating it themselves instead of unknowingly putting their trust into Clan Ferros to solve it for them. She’d even kept it a secret from him. Were they really coming under fire by Ionian insurgents and nobody except them and Viktor’s people knew anything about it?

“But…” Jayce bit into the orange. “What would Ionians want with my hammer? Don’t they despise hextech as a perversion of regular magic? Even so, how would any of them know enough about me to pull off a hit and run like that?”

“Therein lies the question, Jayce. We know the method and the product, but not the _who._ I do have some suspicions now, and yet…”

The doors slammed open. A woman in darkness with a metal tail trailed inside, breathless and gasping.

She yelled, “Herald! There’s been a breach at the gate!”

Viktor shot up. “What? From who? Why aren’t there the alarms?” The scepter instantly swapped places between his third arm and dominant.

“The… it’s the Steel Shadow herself, Herald. She’s come for Jayce.”

As they ran out, Jayce merely stared at the orange.

“Heh.” It was a hollow laugh. “More for me.”


End file.
